2012-12-24
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Pylon construction diagram, from Makeshift’s Pylons of Great Britain manifesto/booklet.
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2012-09-11
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Top: London Underground Circuit Map Radio by Yuri Suzuki, 2012 (more here, here).
Bottom: The Underground ‘straight eight’ all-electric skit-set circuit diagram by Harry Beck, March 1933.
2012-05-15
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The power is on - so back off, a poster from the East London line’s late 1990s rebuilding at London Transport Museum’s Pick Mix site (thanks, Chris)
2012-04-25
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Three Mile Island, circa 1980, from Postcards of Mushroom Clouds at Slate.
2012-02-14
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Ellen Huet for SFGate: Metallic balloon zaps power for an hour in S.F.
San Francisco, I love* your shonky infrastructure.
2012-02-08
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My dad photographs the windmills he helps build in various parts of the world. Pictured, Criterion — in the hills of western Maryland near Oakland.
That’s nice, that.
2010-10-29
The Beauty Of Power Lines
The broadcast of BBC Four’s Secret History of the National Grid has, as you may have noticed, regenerated my interest in electricity pylons (partly aided by Joe Moran).
In Alain de Botton’s The Pleasures and Sorrows Of Work, there’s an entire chapter on transmission infrastructure. In it, he mentions two notable books. One is apparently a Korean guide to pylons around the world, which, annoyingly, I have yet to track down.
However, the other, “De schoonheid van hoogspanningslijnen (in het Nederlandse landschap)”, or “The Beauty of Electricity Pylons in the Dutch Landscape”, definitely exists. Here’s an excerpt of a translation of the description:
An often heard opinion is that power lines the horizon visual pollution. The compilers of this publication believe that a conscious way of looking at other aspects of the power line to be apparent, and often there is a certain beauty. The beauty can both relate to the mast itself as the perspective effect of a beautifully designed range and how to measure the line indicates the underlying landscape. Preceded by a brief explanation about the function and typology of high-voltage lines, looks at the problems of designing a line entails.
I’d love to see a translation of the work; I suspect it’s not worth learning Dutch for by itself. It’s also great to see a re-appreciation of human creations as beauty - in the National Gallery there’s a Turner painting of Maidenhead Bridge being crossed by a steam locomotive, as well as a French picture of a railway station. More like this, please.
2010-10-26
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The coat of arms of North Korea, featuring a prominent hydroelectric dam and electricity pylon.
